Sometimes, in this sort of place, you forgot. You stopped realizing that there was a line between where you were and where you are now, and that these people were not the same people you knew once. They’re not the same people your heart yearned for, and they’re not the people you thought they were.

Deepening a kiss won’t bring out love that was never there. Trying harder won’t make love suddenly appear where love never was. Being willfully blind won’t ever make it better.

People are not replacements.

They don’t have spare parts to just notch in when you think one is broken, and it’s hard, when you realize that.

It’s harder when you realize you were a stand in all along and never knew it too. When you realize it wasn’t love but obsession that lent that passion to the touches. When it wasn’t love, but planning that brought someone into your bed.

It reminds you that nothing can be what it was, and that trying to return anything to a former glory is foolish.

All along you should have been trying to make something new, and you forgot, so focused on how things used to be, that people change and not just how you want them to.

You forgot that just because you remember smiles and light, that people change, and when they come home...

When they come home, sometimes they’re no longer innocent.

Sometimes, them coming home really wasn’t the best thing for you, no matter how much you missed them.

Sometimes, you can’t do anything about it, because what else do you have that you can call yours? Not duty or obligation, but yours.

You don’t want someone who was gone for years to vanish again, but is it worth him staying?

Is the hurt of not being loved worth filling whatever gap he’s using you for?

Is it worth not being true to yourself and being strong?

Sometimes, you wonder, and it hurts, because you know you shouldn’t have to wonder at all.

You tell yourself that you don’t want to be a replacement, but you haven’t left. You remain where you’ve been, with calculating hands and possessive kisses that suddenly seem so much different than they used to be.

And you wonder, why you?

If he doesn’t love you, then why you?

Then you realize that you’ll get no answers to questions you refuse to ask, but they won’t be spoken.

Not yet.

Not while the blinding clarity of what you never noticed before is suddenly brilliantly vividly right before your eyes.

So you just realize, sometimes, that you’re a coward, and have to learn to live with that.